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SEO News Roundup for April 3, 2009

Have you every tried optimizing page titles for a singular and plural version for a target keyword? This task can be tricky, but this page title optimization post from Search Engine Land provides some strategies to tastefully squeeze both versions into character-constrained page titles.

Google is placing more focus on Local Search Optimization when it comes to organic rankings. With this latest move, we will see more and more organic traffic shifting to Google maps. This post from Search Engine Guide outlines how Google’s Local Search can affect your SEO efforts.

What is your primary SEO objective? Is your SEO strategy aimed at the right goals? Keep in mind that rankings aren’t everything. They are important, for sure, but getting higher rankings is just a means to end. And those ends should be revenue and profitability.

It’s an SEO’s achille’s heel: writing quality content that converts. This post at Search Engine People does a great job of outlining was that you can write original content that is geared to what (and here it comes…) your customers are actually looking for! Use Google Alerts, Analytics, Trends, etc. and other tools to find out what your customers need and write content around that. Great post.

Do you rely on local search traffic for your SEO campaign? If so, you need to check out Matt’s latest post at SmallBusinessSEM.com. It appears that Google is changing the local game by adding local results to general (head) keywords. The example in the post was for a search on “attorneys.” Use a local IP, get local results. Hmmm…

SEO Zombie has a great post on the difference between a robots.txt file, a meta noindex tag and a meta nofollow tag. These are three examples of how to control what Google or any other search engine does with the pages of your site; whether it be to crawl them but not index, not to crawl or index, etc. Even better the explanations are from Matt Cutts.

Check out SEO Scoop’s case study on how she got ranked in the #2 position in Google within a couple of weeks. Although she notes that the words ‘instant’ and ‘rankings’ should never be in the same sentence together, there are ways to jump your SEO rankings in a relatively short amount of time. See how she managed to do it for her own blog.

Peter Da Vanzo reminds you that SEO isn’t just a practice, it’s a lifestyle. But seriously, he reminds us that we’ve got to stay smarter- and better- and faster than- the competition to develop real success. And it’s true. It’s not all copy and paste, you actually have to try. Sorry about that.